It’s not all fun and lab coats for the working scientist: in fact, you’d probably be surprised at how little time researchers get to spend at the bench. This is partly because they have to dedicate a lot of time to looking for money.

As government funding is increasingly subject to politics and budget cuts, scientists have begun looking for new sources of cash. The most obvious place to look for additional money is the business world; however, without careful navigation and proper safeguards, this can lead to accusations of financially-motivated bias in research results. Charitable organizations can raise money from the public for health-related research, but this leaves out many other worthwhile projects, and there are perennial concerns about how much funding actually goes to science versus how much goes to administrative overhead.

More recently, some researchers have started looking at new funding models, by making use of the Internet to solicit money directly from members of the public. The website Sciflies.org is one such attempt to just that. The site’s tagline is “Make Science Happen” and it encourages members of the public to make donations directly to specific studies. For example, in the psychology section, you can donate to a study on the brain changes associated with compulsive hoarding, and for the engineering buffs, there’s a study about ancient embankments.

As this is the era of social media, the site also offers way to share specific projects on platforms like Facebook, so you can encourage your friends to donate too.

Few would argue against the tiger’s status as an iconic animal. The national animal of India and Bangladesh, the tiger features prominently in paintings ( for example, by Kuniyoshi Utagawa), in literature (Rudyard Kipling or William Blake), and in film (everything from Kung Fu Panda to the upcoming Life of Pi).

But the tiger is also endangered, having lost much of its habitat to human encroachment in the past 100 years. Because of its fierce appearance and reputation, it has long been prized as a big game trophy, and various tiger parts are thought to have medicinal properties, although there is no scientific evidence for the latter.

Tiger Nation, a new participatory website, wants to harness our fascination with the great striped beasts to help save them. If you subscribe to the site, you’ll be treated to photos, articles, and videos about tigers, and you’ll be able track the lives of real tigers in India. There’s also a Tiger Match game in development, which will allow humans to help identify individual tigers that the automatic algorithm (called StripeSense) is unable to check (tigers have unique striping patterns).

To join and have your money go toward saving the endangered tiger, simply register and donate here. Tiger Nation is a joint project of four Indian conservation agencies.

Cutting out the middle man with crowdfunding. (Photo credit: SciFund site screenshot)

Budget cuts. Political agendas. These are just some of the words that strike fear into the hearts of researchers world wide. Why? Because researchers have to spend huge chunks of their time hustling for money to fund their studies, and hundreds, if not thousands of projects get shelved every year because the funding dries up.

While governments and charitable foundations do their best to keep the cash flowing, some researchers are experimenting with a new funding model. If you’ve heard of Kickstarter or RocketHub, you already know the premise of the SciFund Challenge: researchers describe their project on a public website, and anyone with an interest and a few dollars can donate directly to the effort. So far, the SciFund Challenge, in association with RocketHub, has raised more than $176,000 in two rounds for various projects, and organizers are hoping for more as the concept catches on.

You can view a list of the completed SciFund projects here, and while you’re waiting for the next challenge to be presented, you can check out the open, independent science projects on RocketHub (which include an effort to protect Darwin’s Finches) and the open research and innovation projects.

Have you ever read a space science textbook and wondered about things we haven’t explored or begun to understand about space? Have you ever dreamed of running a space experiment of your own? Well, now you have that opportunity!

A group called NanoSatisfi has just launched a Kickstarter fundraiser to launch an Arduino-powered satellite into space. Dubbed “ArduSat,” the goal is to be the first open platform allowing the general public to design and run their own space-based applications, games and experiments, as well as take pictures, and broadcast messages back to Earth.

The satellite itself will be tiny: a miniature cube, measuring 10 x 10 x 10 cm, and weighing roughly 1 kg. It will pack quite a sensory punch, however: plans call for more than 25 sensors, including a Geiger counter, a spectrometer, a magnetometer, and three cameras. (If you want to geek out on the payload details, subscribe to the YouTube channel). The sensors will be connected to user-programmable Arduino processors, on which applications and experiments will be run.

The project is well-designed. You’ll be able to write your experiment or application code from scratch, or make use of snippets and templates available online. Then you’ll be able to upload your code via web-based interface to an ArduSat replica on the ground, to run real-time tests, before uploading them to the real one in space.

If the chance to run your own experiments in space weren’t incentive enough, NanoSatisfi has lined up a number of partners offering some cool perks. Discover Magazine is running a challenge for the most innovative experiment, game or application run on ArduSat, with the prize being Team Development Kit worth $1500. People who contribute to the Kickstarter fundraiser will not only get to reserve time on the satellite, but will get extras like magazine subscriptions and sensor suites. Big time backers will get things like crash course in nanosatellite development, and a Skype chat with NASA astronaut Dr. Story Musgrave.

The funding window is only open until July 15, 2012, so get over to the site now to contribute.